


If He Had Died

by YouHateInvisiblePie



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 13:37:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9387464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouHateInvisiblePie/pseuds/YouHateInvisiblePie
Summary: What if Carlos had died in episode 25 - One Year Later?Cecil's heart was lower than the underground city. No, his heart was at the underground city, where his feet wished to be so that they could stomp, and smash, and rend. To take life as revenge for the life of a scientist that he barely got the chance to know."And I fell in love instantly."He had hoped that with time, Carlos would come to feel the same. Now all that time could do for the radio host was heal the wounds of a love that would never be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by episode 92 - If He Had Lived and the concept of Alternate History Week. Because the second I heard the words Alternate History Week, my brain said "how can I change everything with a single event? Hmm... killing off Carlos ought to do it."

  
"I am still holding this trophy. I..." Cecil said in barely controlled sobs as he informed his listener's of the tragedy that had just occurred.

Carlos was dead. Carlos, perfect Carlos the scientist had not made it past his first year in Night Vale.

"We go now to this puh... pre-recorded public service announcement," he just barely managed to cry out before he started the recording.

"Scientists and science in general would like to remind you that -"

Of course the pre-recorded message had to be about science now. Of course it did. The universe was not so kind as to give Cecil a few moments to collect himself so that he could go on with the show. No, it had to kick him while he was down.

His heart was lower than the underground city. No, his heart was  _at_ the underground city, where his feet wished to be so that they could stomp, and smash, and rend. To take life as revenge for the life of a scientist that he barely got the chance to know.

They really could have been something. There had been something special about the outsider, more than just his perfect hair, that even Cecil, the _voice_ of Night Vale couldn't quite put into words. He tried to though.

"And I fell in love instantly."

He had hoped that with time, Carlos would come to feel the same. Now all that time could do for the radio host was heal the wounds of a love that would never be.

A month passed. The sweltering July heat beat down on the desert, but Cecil barely seemed to notice.

How could Night Vale bounce back so easily? Sure, the town was rather accustomed to death, but Carlos had been so much more than just another citizen. Right? Shouldn't they all still be mourning? He was.

Cecil's world was slowly filling with darkness. Or perhaps it was just the increasing number of buzzing shadow creatures that had been popping up all over town that day.

Absently, Cecil thought that he should probably do a story on them. Were they actually interesting enough though? There wasn't much that he actually found interesting these days, so perhaps Cecil wasn't the best judge. It was something though, so Cecil drove around various parts of town to see where was and wasn't affected.

He took notes out of habit and found that most of the buzzing shadows seemed to be near Mission Grove Park. That would be a nice place for a walk on a date. Cecil would have loved to have taken Carlos to point at the sky and shout in terror; give him a real Night Vale experience.

Over the course of the scientist's year in the desert town he had studied Night Vale and yet somehow managed to not experience and really live it. So focused on observing that he never actually saw. And Night Vale was a beautiful town, although to Cecil there was far less beauty in it now.

As the day went on, more and more people were turning into buzzing shadow entities. Perhaps the town was still in mourning after all, and this was how they chose to show it. For a moment Cecil considered joining them, but quickly reconsidered, reasoning that since his relationship with the scientist was different, how he mourned him should be as well.

Relationship. Cecil huffed at the word. They hadn't gotten that far yet. He was certain that they would have been amazing together though.

He nearly ran into a buzzing shadow person on his was home and he barely even noticed. He was so unhappy.

The Apache Tracker was a racist jerk. How could someone like that exist when Carlos no longer did? It wasn't fair. Nothing was, especially not life. Or death. Actually, the certainty that death would eventually come for everyone, even the universe itself, was the only fair thing in existence.

Cecil sighed while fidgeting absentmindedly with his notes for that evening's broadcast, staring in their direction but without reading, let alone comprehending a single word on the page.

Thankfully there wasn't much going on in Night Vale that day, because Cecil really wasn't in a fit state to report on any actual news. He hadn't been for awhile, but most days he at least tried. Not today though. He just didn't have the energy. And the worst part was that he wasn't even certain if it was the same thing immobilizing the rest of the town's citizens. He couldn't say that though.

It had been five months since - five months and he still felt empty, could still feel the space he knew Carlos was supposed to fill. Considering the fact that they had never been anything, he should be back to normal by now. The acceptable period for mourning had long since passed. Which forced Cecil to either fake being fine, or come up with excuse after excuse for why he wasn't. Today though, Night Vale came up with the perfect excuse for him.

"I myself am slumped against this desk, murmuring into this microphone, too tired by the heat to give more than a token effort to the work of my life.

"Ours is a quiet town. No one speaking but me. If speaking took me any energy, if it were not merely a reflex of my living form, then I myself would not be speaking either." Which is how he had kept up the ruse of being fine, because his body spoke as easily as it breathed, but that was all that came to him easily as of late.

"This day in which nothing happens continues to not.

"Even bodily functions are taking the day off," Cecil droned, hoping that his tone came across as lazy or tired as opposed to uncaring or detached. He should care, he knew that he should, he just couldn't bring himself to. He didn't feel much of anything anymore.

"Loved ones, looking on, without the energy needed to weep."

Then even gravity stopped.

"I don't really have the energy to think of another word." A confession that his listeners didn't even know the half of.

"We apologize but won't do anything about it. Doing things, right? Movement, you know? Existing? Do you see what I mean?"

Cecil wasn't certain if he wanted his listeners to empathise. It was terrifying in it's own right, being indifferent to your own existence. The world as he knew it was going to end, and he couldn't be bothered enough to care.

The world didn't end.

"We wake up. We move on. No state is our state forever. All is fleeting." Perhaps if he said it enough he might even believe it one day.

"Personally, I love the annual auction." And he did. It didn't even feel like a lie to use the word love this time. It almost didn't hurt. Maybe he _was_ starting to heal. Maybe just maybe moving on was possible.

"Your parents, your friends, your pets," your lovers, and almost lovers too. "Each death leaving a small but irreparable scar on your not yet still, still-beating heart." Even if the scars seem huge. Even if you don't understand how your heart could keep on beating after being ripped from your chest and shattered into a million shards that tear you apart from the inside out with every breath you take.

"The living tell the dying not to leave and the dying do not listen."

_"Oh! A truly fearful thing has happened listeners."_

"The dying tell us not to be sad for them and we do not listen."

_"He fell back to the side of the small hole in the pin retrieval area of lane five."_

"The dialogue between the living and the dead is full of misunderstanding and silence."

_"So much blood. He collapsed completely."_

Or perhaps Cecil wasn't quite as healed as he had hoped.

"Despite this, I must enter the auction house now myself, taking my life into my hands even more than usual."

He felt as if he were falling apart at the seams all over again. He couldn't afford to now. This was insurmountably important.

"If I did not win lot 37 I would be unraveled. Perhaps I would be unraveled either way. The dull ache I felt was a primal ache of incompletion." He could have completed me. "The separation an infant feels when pulled too soon from it's mother's embrace." An embrace I never knew yet somehow miss the feel of.

"I forgot to raise my paddle."

The last thing Cecil needed in his life was more complications, another thing to worry and be upset about, yet that is exactly what he got.

First Carlos, then Strex Corp. taking over the radio station and slowly the town, and now this. First his heart, then his livelihood, and finally his body. Nothing was his own anymore.

Then the oranges came along and things just stopped existing altogether. Blinking out of existence and no one quite knew why.

Oranges didn't typically grow in deserts, did they?

As Cecil was considering looking that information up, John Peters, you know, the farmer? burst into the studio and attempted to force feed the radio host an orange.

Cecil struggled, of course, and did his best to fight back. He even tried reasoning as a last resort even though it has never, not once in history, worked, and it did not this time either.

In his last few moments before John Peters pressed the orange to his lips, Cecil irrationally thought that maybe somehow Carlos with his science could have saved him from this fate. As Cecil flickered from existence, he couldn't help but wonder, as he had so often in the six and a half months since the scientist's death: what if he had lived?

**Author's Note:**

> Episodes used:  
> One Year Later  
> Pilot  
> First Date  
> Lazy Day  
> The Auction  
> One Year Later (again)  
> Orange Grove  
> Summer Reading Program


End file.
